Wandering Goat

Travel stuff by Miguel A. Villarreal

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Location: New York, NY

Monday, August 04, 2008

Penang (not the restaurants in manhattan, the island in the straits)

So I ended up spending two days in Penang - Malaysia's second city. And it showed! No, I'm kidding, sort of, lovely old chinese two-story shophouses and some nice Kongsi houses and good Peranakan/Nonya architecture (you'll have to look up old posts if you want to remember what that means) but not really much to report otherwise.  Good food though, I would recommend you shy away from the Rojak unless tropical fruit drowned in syrup and fish paste is one's idea of a good time. People seemed to take a genuine interest in the fact that I was there to sample their Hokkien Mee (a seafood/noodle soup with tamarind or something sweet in it that's damned good, one of my favorite noodle soups I'd have to say) and Char Kway Teoh ( a noodle dish that is the essence of awesomeness) so I guess that's something. But anyway it's your standard old colonial town, the first British settlement in Malaya but bypassed on the way to greatness by Singapore in the 19th C, which is good and bad, leaving it behind but free of overdevelopment and Japanese bomb damage. Old British Colonial outposts, of which I reckon I have now seen a hell of a lot of in my days, all have the aura of ghostly poetic metaphorism, which really goes wild if you traipse around the old Colonial cemetary (which I often due, I've done it like twice). So you see the old graves with their Victorian encomiums to the various victims of deaths at sea, tropical disease, childbirth etc and they're overgrown amid the banyan trees and the capital R Romanticism of the moment kind of makes you want to vomit, where you're ashamed of even thinking of waxing anything about it.
 
A few random thoughts for the record, on arrival in Malaysia one is still greeted with the homey and welcoming "home of the deadly death penalty for drug traffickers" rannouncement, and according to recent signage, piranha imports are also expressly labeled as uncool here, so keep that one in mind.  I should also say I'm fortunate to be here during yet another "Visit Malaysia Year" - just like 2007, according to unchanged signs, and just like the last time I was here in 2005. 

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Romantic graveyards and machine gun toting policewomen in headscarves...
the land of contrast.

11:42 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Char Kway Teoh rocks!!

8:11 PM  

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